There are about 50 front- and back-of-house workers rubbernecking inside the kitchen of the soon-to-open Caracol restaurant. They’re all trying to get a good look at – and a sense of – what chef Hugo Ortega is creating for his new coastal Mexican restaurant.

With each dish he plated and his crew fussed over, there was a growing excitement that something big is about to happen.

And indeed it is. Come Dec. 7 restaurateurs Tracy Vaught and her husband Ortega – a James Beard Award-nominated chef for his work at his eponymous Hugo’s — are set to open their most ambitious restaurant yet. The Spanish name for sea snail, Caracol is still very much under construction next door to the recently opened Osteria Mazzantini in the Galleria neighborhood’s BBVA Compass Plaza. The main dining area of the 8,000-square-foot space is a busy, noisy push toward completion. But the kitchen is the hot spot – where all the new servers and staff are watching Ortega, his brother pastry chef Ruben Ortega and Caracol’s new executive chef, Daniel Bridges (who recently moved to Houston from Las Vegas where he worked at Bellagio), prepare sample dishes from a menu still being hammered out.

Vaught wants to save some culinary surprises for the opening but allows that the menu will be something of a culinary tour along the Mexican coasts. There will be seafood cocteles, escabeches, crudos and “ceviche de Caracol’’ – a conch ceviche that Ortega has great memories of making with his brother Jose Luis at a resort in Playa del Carmen. He loved it so much he chose to name the restaurant Caracol.

“Mostly all the recipes have been from the travels Hugo and I or Hugo and his family have taken,” Vaught said. Some of the ideas for Caracol came from research Hugo and Ruben did – eating throughout Veracruz and the Yucatan Peninsula – for Ortega’s cookbook, “Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico.”

Ortega readily will tell you he loves seafood. But that wasn’t always the case for the landlocked boy from Mexico City. “I remember being seven years old and my mom and I went to the market stalls where they sell fish,” he said. “I remember seeing catfish with the big whiskers and thought who in the world would eat that?”
Vaught promises Caracol’s menu will be full of bold, complex flavors. “In the same way Hugo’s is super full-flavored, it will be here as well,” she said. “It’s very robust.”

Those aggressive flavors and sweet grilled seafood proved to be a welcome challenge for sommelier and mixologist Sean Beck, who is planning a modern cocktail menu, as well as a beer program (local draughts, large-format brews). But it is the wine Beck is most excited about. “Obviously we’re going to have a lot of white wine,” said Beck who praises the styles, flavors and versatility of seafood-friendly whites. “We’re going to get to show the implicit beauty of really elegant white wine.”

That the menu will sample from various Mexican coastal regions gives Beck the ability to go broad and explore the international nature of port cities that influence white wine choices. Example: expect to see a sake or two on the wine menu.